dare I say it?

I think I am seeing the light. meaning, managing charlie, eleanore and claire might be getting a teensiest, teensiest bit easier. I think for the first time since the girls were born (20.5 months ago) when I am home with them I am not running like crazy. I can sit down with my coffee (on the floor mind you) and play with them and enjoy myself. I can sit and watch them take a bath without constantly having to be 3 steps ahead so I can stay on top of things. I can make lunch and they will often entertain each other for 5 minutes without crying. now there are still a lot of fights to be broken up mostly now -  between claire and eleanore and charlie and the girls. and I am now entering the harder (in my mind) part of parenting – discipline multiple children. eleanore and claire are different than charlie and different than each other and I am having to draw from deep deep in my brain to come up with different parenting and discipline techniques. eleanore is one tough, hardnosed girl. she isn’t even a bit bothered with any of the parenting strategies I used with charlie (time outs, take things away, break time, slap on the hand, etc). while ellie is being disciplined claire is nervously watching. she is concerned for ellie and taking notes on what not to do. she will then repeat “no, no, no” over and over while pointing out what they shouldn’t do again (ie: last night it was throwing duplos). I have a feeling these two are going to keep us on our toes.

for the most part though the girls play really nicely and understand more about sharing and taking turns than charlie did at their age. when I look at the girls they seem to be transforming into little girls. they are having a word explosion (finally!) and are talking more and more. I am still the one who understands the most, but both girls like to show me what they can say. they will pick up a hat and walk over and say hat or more like “ha”. you can ask claire to say “hey ellie” and she will mutter something like “hee eyee”. eleanore will say “hee cere”.  both girls will ask for their “sisssst” (sister), which is really sweet. what a blessing these two are to our family. we love you eleanore and claire.

good morning claire.

good morning squinty ellie.

yesterday we had a light snow. ellie was checking it out first thing.

 

claire was tending to her babies.

it was so sweet she took the bracelet off her wrist and put it on her babies.

charlie is happily playing cars.

eleanore – 20 months

claire – 20 months.

ugh!

parenting is hard. really hard sometimes. I think it goes up and down. and charlie and I are in a deep deep valley right now. that kid is as strong-willed as me. the hardest part is that when it is just charlie and me (or bill or any other adult) he is fantastic. super fun to be with, obedient, respectful, etc – just a delight to be around. but when he is home with his two very busy, very interested sisters he transforms from a little boy you can talk through challenges with to a little boy who reacts quickly and is often mean. now i know it is hard to have two little rug rats always wanting to be right at your side and playing with your stuff, but even if they are playing with something totally different he will run over and want to take it and play with it (even something really babyish). he has 5-8 minute glimpses of perfection – where he is the sweetest, most kind big brother. he will play hide and seek with them, get them toys, point out pictures in a book, but it is as if he can only handle so much and then he gets jealous and doesn’t know how to handle himself. we have talked through all these feelings and I just purchased a feelings book that we have been reading, but it is challenging to have the time to really talk through every correction when I have 2 other little, pretty demanding, people to manage (right now – “manage” means saving them from every high place they climb up to). I try not to bark at him about everything, but sometimes I feel like every other minute I am correcting, asking, reminding him about something. I can’t let him push his sisters over when they try to get to his cars. I can’t let him take something directly from them. overall I just feel defeated. mostly because he is getting more disrespectful with me by the day. out of any behavior I cannot handle being talked sassy to, but I find I am hearing it more and more and my response is getting more and more snappy because I am about to snap. obviously something is not working and I am hoping having bill home this weekend will help get us back on track. he needs to have someone else correct him in a different way and bill is so good and managing his emotions and words. it will be good for me and for charlie.

the other other thing I have to mention in this rant is that when you take an almost 3 year old little boy and put an iphone near him he becomes an animal. a crazy, obsessed, out of control animal. we don’t let charlie play with our iphones – occasionally he can watch a “mater” you tube clip on it, but that is usually a reward (which he has been not been getting a lot lately). our friends, aunts/uncles, grandparents, etc do let him play on theirs and the kid can navigate that thing better than most adults. he literally loses his marbles when it is time to be done unless prior to giving him the iphone you set up an expectation. with charlie you have to present the situation and talk him through what is going to happen when he is done with the phone/dvd/tv/etc before you give it to him to ensure that the ending is smooth (ie: charlie you are going to be watching numbers land soon – when you are done what are you going to say? “thank you mom”). if you do that he is usually pretty good. when bill and I were talking about what we should do with his iphone/ipad obsession I almost wanted to cut it out completely, but bill had a good point that technology will be a part of his life forever. at some point he will have to start learning how to manage technology. however, we have joked that if we wanted to stop parenting now we could just purchase him an ipad and we would be good to go for about 3 years.

thankfully I read a blog post the other day that talked about how as moms we really want our kids to be obedient, well-behaved, etc so that we look good. but in life our goals should not be to raise perfect kids, but instead raise a God loving, responsible adult. it was a great thing for me to read at the time because I need to remember what my ultimate goal is. charlie is definitely pushing me to pray harder and to lean on God for his wisdom and knowledge during these challenging times. I don’t even want to think about when he is in his teens. hopefully by teaching him that his decisions can have consequences we will be preparing him for the years ahead. prayers for patience and wisdom would be wonderful!

charlie I do love you more than you can imagine. I love spending time with you and you are a sweet, caring, goofy little dude. I can’t wait until we are out of this rut!

tell me it is just a phase!!!

wow – parenting a 2.5 year old is tough. for the first 2 years of charlie’s life our parenting style was working out pretty good. 9 months – we started managing him. around 1 year we started time outs where he would stand with his hands on the wall and in one place. it was great. I wasn’t frustrated or confused about our parenting style. then he started to refuse to stand up during the time out so we started strapping him in his high chair while facing a wall.  when that didn’t seem to be packing enough punch we had to move time outs into our room where we had a booster seat strapped to our bed and we could strap him in so he would be removed from the action (can you tell we love strapping things). which takes us to now…I have stopped putting him in time outs in our room because he usually starts screaming (which is against the rules and adds minutes to the time out), which just elongated his time out and by the time he gets done screaming the real reason he was in time out is forgotten. in the last month or so charlie is really pushing things. he tests every. single. thing! I am not sure if this is a 2 and 1/2 year old thing or a parenting thing or a big brother who has 2 very need baby sisters thing, but either way it is exhausting. currently my strategy is to try and figure out what is important to him to be able to start taking toys/privileges away when he is not sharing, etc and when he is talking back or hitting i walk him down to his room and he spends 5-10+ minutes in his room. the crazy thing about this parenting phase is that I don’t see a ton of improvement yet. when he was younger after we would start the discipline I would notice a change, but that is harder to see now. obviously, most of the issues are bigger now (sharing, taking toys, anger management, being disrespectful vs. not touching outlets, cords, bookshelves, etc). with some issues he still gets put in time out in his highchair in our room. take tonight for example, he decided to blatantly disobey and throw a piece of noodle on the floor. bill moved his whole chair into our room and as he was going into the room he started his screaming bit. he will do little screams over and over as we increase the time on the timer. he started off with a 18 minute timeout (6 minutes to begin with and then a lot of screaming). bill and I decided to put on CARS during dinner really loud so he would think we were having a blast at dinner (it also stunned the girls down too). when bill went in to check on him and remind him why he was in such a long timeout he told bill he was going to hit him. well that definitely added time to the timer. all in all he spent about 45 minutes in the chair between threatening to hit bill and screaming the time just kept increasing. agh!  

a lot of people will say - he is 2 and a half it is just a phase. i have a hard time with that-what are we supposed to do just ignore his misbehavior? i dont think so! it is really hard to watch your sweet, mostly obedient boy turn into a sometimes angry, disobedient boy. it is so confusing! anyone with insight please share. we are going to keep being consistent and continue to remind C that we are in control. it is definitely challenging to try to figure him out.  I can’t even think about having 2 – 2.5 year olds yet or I start shaking. hopefully eleanore and claire won’t be as strong willed as charlie. I can dream right?